Resonance
Gal Leshem is a London based artist, working at the intersection of art, ecology and social engagement. Her work is developed through a site specific and research-based approach, often engaging with plants, heritage sites and objects embedded in myth, memory and folklore. Using video, textiles, and print the work explores the politics of green spaces and our relationship to particular locations.
The Yiddishland Pavilion residency program continues its partnership with Venezia Contemporanea during the Biennale, expanding this year through new collaborations with Jewish Renaissance and the Montreal Jewish Museum. Together, these partners bring artists from the UK and Canada to Venice to live and work in the historic Jewish Ghetto.
The Montreal Jewish Museum supports one artist and Jewish Renaissance supports two. Artists were selected through an open call in the UK and a targeted call for submissions in Montreal. Residencies last between 10 days and three weeks, focusing on research into the linguistic, architectural, and environmental context of the Ghetto, as well as the wider sites of the Biennale and Venice.
The Montreal Jewish Museum supports one artist and Jewish Renaissance supports two. Artists were selected through an open call in the UK and a targeted call for submissions in Montreal. Residencies last between 10 days and three weeks, focusing on research into the linguistic, architectural, and environmental context of the Ghetto, as well as the wider sites of the Biennale and Venice.
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For the Yiddish Pavilion Residency, Gal will situate the project within the gardens of the Giardini della Venezia, engaging both with the Biennale site and the Jewish herbal traditions rooted in the Venetian Ghetto. The work will center on the plant life inhabiting these parallel spaces, tracing connections, correlations, and tensions between cultivated ornamental landscapes and vernacular medicinal practices. Leshem will adopt a twofold research approach: conducting a close exploration of the Giardini through the identification and collection of plant material, while simultaneously delving into the histories of Jewish healers and midwives, whose knowledge will be understood as grounded in the use of common local flora. The project will speculate on the potential transformation of medicinal plants into decorative species within the formal gardens, while also examining how Jewish herbal traditions will have evolved through exchanges with neighboring Christian and Muslim cultures, alongside the persistence of distinct practices. During the residency in Venice, Leshem will pay particular attention to the region’s Jewish herbal knowledge, where plants will carry protective, symbolic, and medicinal meanings, and where such wisdom will have historically been preserved and transmitted across generations by women caregivers and healers.
Hannah Berger is a Montreal-based visual artist and fiction writer who works in a variety of media. Her work is strung with common threads of history and the excavation of language, often employing historical and experimental methods of making and storytelling. She holds a BFA in Studio Art and Art History from Concordia University, and was recently awarded the 2025 Montreal Fiction Prize.
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In Venice, Hannah will explore the etymological origins of the word ghetto as referring to the site of foundry waste on top of which the Venetian Jewish Ghetto was originally built. This research will further develop a project that combines her sculptural installation practice with her fiction writing in a series of archaic-looking bronze tablets that display an experimental short story. Inspired by materials such as the copper scroll, the only Dead Sea scroll inscribed on metal which describes the hiding place of buried silver and gold, Hannah will write a short story about life in the Jewish Ghetto in Venice in which the hidden fortune is the community and continuity that is forged in diasporic life. The story, pressed into bronze tablets in bas relief, will draw connections between the origins of the ghetto and its present reality, clashing with the ancient look of its substrate as a comment on
how we write and rewrite our own history.
how we write and rewrite our own history.
Yahel Halevi is an Israeli artist based in Glasgow. In his practice, he uses sculpture, site-specific interventions, and photography to engage with places and objects in ways that reveal their hidden meanings and histories. He's particularly interested in borders, thresholds, and gateways as political, religious, and emotional sites, and in exploring what it means to be Jewish, queer, and an immigrant nowadays. Outside his artistic practice, he is active in the Jewish community in the UK and Glasgow in particular, and works as a program facilitator for the Bronfman Fellowship, a pluralistic Jewish leadership fellowship in North America and Israel.
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For the Residency, Yahel will develop a new iteration of his ongoing project Kaddish, adapting it to the historic Jewish Ghetto of Venice. The project explores forgotten histories of Jewish communities through documentation, ritual gesture, and archival research. In Glasgow, where the project was initiated, he photographed former Jewish sites (many now demolished or repurposed) and placed stones on their imagined or physical doorsteps, referencing the Jewish tradition of placing stones on graves as acts of remembrance. He then combined these images with archival materials to form posters that resemble both historical museum panels and the layout of a Talmudic page. In Venice, the project will focus on physical traces of Jewish life in the Ghetto: former shops, subtle architectural markers, sites of restriction, and forgotten borders, exploring the tension between restriction and safety. The residency would provide a concentrated period of immersion, allowing him to respond directly to the architectural, somatic, and emotional landscape of the Venetian Ghetto, and to consider how acts of remembrance can function as both mourning and affirmation.
An innovative place to connect with diverse Jewish heritage, life, and identity through new arts and cultural experiences. Operating as a community-driven, experimental cultural hub that brings Montreal’s Jewish past and present to the public through exhibitions, cultural events, walking tours, and research, MJM invites people of all backgrounds to connect with Jewish culture, history, and community.
A media and cultural platform dedicated to engaging audiences with Jewish culture through print, digital content, events, and tours. It showcases dynamic activity across Jewish communities worldwide while celebrating the diversity of Jewish life, past and present, in the UK and beyond.
An arts organisation based in Venice’s historic Jewish Ghetto, supporting cultural initiatives promoting diversity, inclusivity and dialogue through artistic engagement with Jewish heritage past and present.